A serious publisher has contacted me about writing a serious book about Linux shell programming.

It is all really very serious. I’m not used to being serious, as you can probably tell from the fact that I have now used the word “serious” four times in this three-sentence post.

I am rather keen to write a book on the subject, not because I’m vain, or desperate for money, but because the stuff I have seen out there in dead-tree format has been of rather low quality. Also because of all the emails I’ve received over the years, they have all been positive, and none has said anything along the lines of “I didn’t need any of that because I bought Book[X]”, or indeed any book. People have emailed me, asking for advice as to what book to buy, and I have been unable to recommend any book that I have seen.

So:
What would you like to see in your ideal book about UNIX / Linux shell scripting, be it Bourne, Bash, ksh, tcsh, zsh, whatever?

Please don’t be timid; if you want to know how to work out how many nose-flutes can be fitted into the area of a Boeing 757, you won’t be anything like as strange as some of the correspondants I’ve had over the years, so please, tell me what is bugging you, what has bugged you, or even what you think might be likely to bug you in days / months / years to come.

I’m likely to answer any specific questions here and now, whether or not they end up in the book, but anything you’d like to see in a book, too… post that here, and I’ll have a stab at it.

Also, I would of course be interested to know if you have found any useful books on or around the subject, and what they did particularly well.